Archive for the ‘fear mongers’ Category

Far-Right culture warrior Steve Bannon was bounced off the National Security Council yesterday as national intelligence director Dan Coats and Joint Chiefs chair General Joseph Dunford were to rejoin the grownups on the NSC principals committee. One rumor says Mr. Bannon was only on the NSC to babysit fellow lunatic Michael Flynn, who has since resigned. This move probably means a cleansing apocalyptic nuclear war is less likely the top US security strategy.

General H.R. McMaster, who replaced Mr. Flynn as national security adviser, is said to be behind the change. In a more puzzling move, two former Republican governors with no defense or foreign relations experience, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, were added to the principals committee. A sobering thought: Mr. Perry, who wanted to abolish the department he now heads, is in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

The Republican Party that has paralyzed the federal government and the Nation has a clear message for midterm voters: Like how we didn’t pass any bills in the House? Give us the Senate too! Or else …. uh, or else Ebola-bearing ISIS Zombie terrorists will sneak across the Mexican border and … and brainwash your kids with Common Core standards and veggie school lunches, and force you to have good health insurance and higher wages and cheap gasoline! Vote now before it’s too late!

Ex-financier Mitt Romney in a conference call to corporate CEOs in June:

“I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope — I hope you pass those along to your employees. Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well.”

“Obamacare ‘puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have.’ Romney is reviving Sarah Palin’s old death panels lie here. Obamacare does establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board to help constrain the growth of Medicare spending. The body has no authority to dictate the practices of the private insurance marketplace. And the law also makes explicit that this body is banned from rationing care or limiting medical benefits to seniors.”

“Just what to do with the nation’s healthcare system has been argued time and again – but it always seems to come back to the ‘death panels.’

Such was the case at the debate in Denver on Wednesday night, when moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates whether Obamacare, one of the most contentious issues this election season, should be repealed.

“It used to be that D.C. architecture consisted of graceful Georgetown mansions, neoclassical federal buildings — and, of course, the monuments. When the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts was founded in 1910 to guide Washington’s architectural development, it reviewed designs such as those of the Lincoln Memorial and the Federal Triangle. Over the seven years I’ve served on the commission, however, an increasing amount of time is spent discussing security-improvement projects: screening facilities, hardened gatehouses, Delta barriers, perimeter fences, and seemingly endless rows of bollards. We used to mock an earlier generation that peppered the U.S. capital with Civil War generals on horseback; now I wonder what future generations will make of our architectural legacy of crash-resistant walls and blast-proof glass.”

— Wittold Rybczynski, Meyerson professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. Read more: